2011-07-22
Good Morning Dear Ones,
One way of defining grace is God’s willingness to make us His friends, despite our weaknesses, infirmities, and sin. This was discussed last week in the citation of RO 5: 8-11, “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we ere still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now be justified by His blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath though Him! For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through His life! Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through Whom we have now received reconciliation.” Having said all of this, we need to look at the issue of free agency, which God in Christ has given us.
God draws the boundary line between how much human willfulness He will allow and disallow, so that His greater purpose, i.e. to bring humans back to Him, isn’t thwarted. And yet, He doesn’t want us to be His puppets on a string either. God needs to know that our faith is real. One extreme is what the Antinomians [meaning without law] were desiring in Christ’s time. They were saying that since God has given us grace, then it is grace without license [RO 6:15]. Paul argues against this extreme, while at the same time arguing against The stultifying legalism of the opposite extreme [RO 7: 5]. Instead, we are told to obey the Law but to do in the way of the Spirit [RO 7: 6-7]. While there is nothing in the written Scriptures about God abrogating a small portion of His power to mankind, it seems logical to me that He must have done this in order to give mankind free agency. That’s the ability to make a choice of their own, not the forced choice by God or the adversary, as to whether or not to come to faith in His Son. Without having done this, how else would God know that it is mankind’s free choice as to whether or not to come to faith? This certainly would never have been the devil forcing it, because the adversary would never choose for us to come to faith in the Lord Jesus. And we know that a certain, albeit smaller percentage of people than the alternative, do come to faith in the Son. We must recall that “many are called and few are chosen” [MT 22: 14]. In this author’s humble opinion, the issue of use of our free agency to come into a covenant relationship with our Lord is what makes this relationship so very precious to our God. He knows from what He has said through Paul, in HE 4: 15, that we are making the choice to have faith despite all the temptations to sin set before us. “For we do not have a High Priest Who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted to every way, just as we are-yet was without sin.”
God’s understanding of our needs and what is the cost of our discipleship is revealed in the very next verse, HE 4: 16, “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” As for the boundaries and consequences of righteousness, they are more clearly defined than ever as explained in RO 3: 26 with the onset of first the Covenant of the Law and then later, with the Covenant of Grace. Let’s begin, for the sake of clarity, with RO 3: 25, “God presented Him [Christ] as a Sacrifice of Atonement through faith in His blood. He did this to demonstrate His justice, because in his forbearance He had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished---(26) He did it to demonstrate His justice at the present time, so as to be just and the One Who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” In clearest words, mankind has been sinners since the original sin. Until the time of the giving of the Covenant of the Law, God took no action to correct this sin or to charge mankind with negative consequences for their sins, because they had no way to know what was right with God and what wasn’t. However, with the giving of the Law, which traditional Jews commemorate on Shavuot [pronounced “Shah-voo-ot”] 50 days after the Passover each year, they now had a way to know what is righteous and what isn’t in God’s sight. It is now possible for God to allow sinners who knowingly sin to suffer negative consequences for continuing to sin. However, these Jewish people who chose to obey the Law became very legalistic over the yeas. Form took precedence over content, and Ten Commandments ballooned into 613 laws, which no one, except for Christ Himself, could keep perfectly! With the onset of the Covenant of Grace, sealed in the blood of Christ, people understood how to live righteously not just to the written letter of the Law but in the Spirit God intended. This now emphasized the content of God’s meaning, and not just the form. RO 7: 6, “But how, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old ways of the written code.”
We are well reminded of JN 15: 16-17, “You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in My name. This is My command: love each other.” And we are each left to deal individually with this question: What is your covenant relationship with God and how can it be improved?
PRAYER: O Lord, we understand that with the beginning of a covenant relationship with you, we are held to Your ethics and teaching. This is a choice we make on our own without coercion from either You or the evil one. We are forever grateful that You give us this choice and that You teach us how to live by it. We are aware that the alternative to this precious covenant relationship is sure spiritual death, the kind that came to the criminal who was crucified at the same time You were but refused to have faith in You. That man and all who serially reject You as a lifestyle, will sink into the torments part of hell and will suffer conscious and eternal torment from which there is no escape. The closest description we have of this is in LK 16: 23-24, “In hell, where he [the rich man] was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’” Abraham refused explaining in (26), “And besides all this between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.” The righteous choices we make have their rewards. We are given in RO 8: 29 the hope of the resurrection, just as Christ, the “First among many brothers” had. This opens the way to an eternal life of blissful friendship and fellowship with You in heaven. We are reunited with all those who have gone on to heaven before us, and we will spend our time using the talents You gave us in worshipping and serving You. That is the way from paradise where we rest, awaiting the great rapture [1 THESS 4: 13-17] when we will have a “meeting in the air” with Christ, our Lord and Messiah]. We utter “Maran atha!” [Come, O Lord –Aramaic-1 COR 16: 22]. We beg that You receive our thanks and praise forever. In Christ’s holy/mighty name. Amen.
NEXT WEEK: We will begin a new segment of the “Our Covenant” messages called “Bonded by Blood.” Our investigation of covenants will allow us to delve into different kinds of covenants, with the understanding that God is always a Participant, only sometimes tacitly and other times overtly. There was a reason that Christ spoke directly on the taking of vows before the Father in MT 6: 33-37. This is never to be done lightly. God means for us to keep promises we make righteously, so we must think first before making a promise. And then, we must keep the promises we make. My past experience is that breaking promises leads to sorrow and destruction. Making rash promises does the same. Any vow taken before God is even more important. This is no reason to refuse ever to enter into marriage or other important, well-conceived commitments for carefully-considered reasons. That is because a refusal to ever commit to anything is a one-way ticket to misery. For example, living in uncommitted sexual relationships leads to having children out of wedlock. Since 80 % of these relationships fail, these children are left to grow up without at least one of their parents. And that doesn’t even speak to the failure rate of blended families. Of course, they don’t all fail, but the reality of many of them doing so can’t be ignored. The statistics speak for themselves. Our God loves us and wants us to live in a covenant relationship with Him. The rewards of doing so involve true happiness an inner peace. It is He Who is the Source of these latter things, and we must raise our hands in praise and thanks to Him for it!
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn
JS 24: 15